Developing your sales staff

Developing your salespeople is an ongoing process. Unfortunately, many sales managers think their job is done once they have hired and trained someone. After that they expect performance. They spend time managing and measuring their team members and reporting progress to senior management. They get upset when team members are not hitting their goals, and they have talks with them about their performance and do their best to figure out how to motivate them. Typically this does not work and is frustrating to all involved.

Sales managers with the best sales forces know that salespeople need ongoing coaching to be their best. It is your job to develop your salespeople. To get the desired results you have to spend 80 percent of your time coaching your salespeople. The job of the chief executive officer, vice president of sales or owner is to make sure this can happen.

If you want a team of successful salespeople you have to have a good development plan. And in order to make a good development plan you have to know what they are doing, not just from them telling you but from seeing it yourself. There is no way around it: Sales managers have to spend time listening to and watching their salespeople. Otherwise you will be guessing about the reason for success or failure of these people. You won't know what they need to do to improve or what to encourage and appreciate so they keep doing it.

Here are some keys to successfully developing your salespeople:

* Hire right: As Mac Anderson says, "You Can't Send a Duck to Eagle School."

* New-hire training: Provide excellent new-hire training, give them the product, sales and company culture training they need.

* Development plans: Make an annual development plan for each salesperson with their input.

Ongoing training: Provide excellent ongoing sales and product training, don't assume they don't need it, shouldn't need it or that they should know how to do their job.

One-to-one meetings: Hold one-to-one meetings with a set agenda on a regular basis. A chat won't do it.

Coaching: Spend 80 percent of your time coaching, listening and watching their behavior directly, then ask questions and make a plan.

Encourage and appreciate: Most employees do not feel appreciated by their boss and therefore may not do their best.

Fire right: We are always too quick to hire and too slow to fire.

Mac Anderson wrote about one of the best lessons he's learned in his book, "You Can't Send a Duck to Eagle School".

"You can't teach someone to want to serve; you can't teach people to smile; you can't teach personality but you can hire someone with those qualities and teach them your product and your culture."

Hire people you can develop. Look for desire to learn, great attitude, ability to solve problems, intelligence, initiative and confidence. Anyone with these characteristics who wants to work for your company can learn to sell and learn your product. If you hire otherwise, you may have difficulty developing the individual to meet and exceed goals.

When you're training new hires, don't stop at product knowledge. Make sure you review sales skills, and teach the culture of your company. We are always in such a hurry to get people started selling that we do ourselves and them an injustice. Rushing salespeople into the field can create many problems down the road that can be difficult to deal with. Later development depends on initial training. Give the salesperson a chance to learn the importance of each department. Have them visit with and shadow employees who will directly work with sales. Be sure they meet people they will interface with at other locations if possible or at least introduce them by a conference call and make sure they have each other's photos. Assign them a mentor. It is easier to develop people who are well grounded in your company culture and have relationships with their colleagues.

Every year each salesperson should have input into a development plan. Start by asking what they plan to do this year to improve in their field. Ask what help they need and then tell them a few areas you would like to see improvement in. Make a plan that includes shadowing others in their field, learning more about the competition, reading industry journals, reading books and magazines about sales, attending product and sales training, trying new things, receiving coaching from you and learning new computer skills to enhance their ability to serve customers.

Plan individual and group sales and product training for your team. No one learns it all on the first go-round. There is some training that your team should do together every year to help them develop. Information that all of them need, things they all need to review, projects they can do together, team building and sharing sales ideas. There are some things that only individuals need that can be provided one-on-one or by outside training groups. Attending these trainings should be part of the development plans.

Scheduled one-to-one meetings also are a must. Having an agenda keeps you on track and on time with your meetings which is good for everyone involved. Be sure the agendas have an item to review the development plans. Always develop an action plan with dates and review actions and their completion at each meeting.

Spend 80 percent of your time coaching. Are you wondering how you are going to do that with your current workload? You are going to have to manage your own time very well and talk to your boss to make this a reality. You need to have the time to listen to your salespeople during every step of the sales process. If you have inside salespeople this is easier. The ideal ratio of salespeople to sales managers is 10:1. In this case you need to find time to spend several hours with each salesperson every month. This is on top of the one-to-one meetings. Is it possible? Let's do the math.

If you meet with each salesperson one-to-one for one hour every two weeks, that uses 10 hours. Then add 30 minutes for prep and follow up for those meetings and that adds five hours. That is only 15 hours out of the 80 in a two-week period (assuming a 40-hour work week - ha!) So you should have plenty of time. If you spend 80 percent of your time in a two-week period coaching that means you have 64 hours for coaching. You just used 15 hours so you have 49 left to split between 10 people. That's 4.9 hours each every two weeks.

That is not much time but I will guarantee it is probably more than you are spending now. Of course life gets in the way and you may have more than 10 salespeople but it will be worth every minute of time you spend because your salespeople will become more successful.

Changing behavior is not easy even when people want to do it. If we don't receive any feedback or positive results we will have little motivation to continue to change. Development is change. You are asking your salespeople to learn and continuously improve. Why would they do that if they can keep their job and get the same pay and not do it? Why would they do it if no one seems to care whether they do or not? Encourage your salespeople to work on their development. Appreciate their effort and appreciate their change in behavior even more. They will start reaping the rewards when their results increase, but the fact that you appreciate their effort may mean even more. As we all know, people don't usually leave their job, they leave their boss. Most people leave their job for another job that is similar in hopes of finding a boss that will appreciate them.

If you do all of the above and the salesperson still does not perform, then it is time to make a bigger change. Firing someone should never be a surprise. If someone can't do their jo,b it is frustrating for them and everyone around them. If you made a good hiring decision, the initial training was good, you helped them plan and execute their development plan, you coached, encouraged and appreciated them and you reviewed their progress in biweekly one-to-one meetings and they still can't do the job then they need to be coached out of that position. Everyone wants to succeed and feel good. Help them find a place where they can do that at your company or at another.

Alice R. Heiman is president of Reno-based Alice Heiman LLC. Her Web site is www.aliceheiman.com.